The Grace of Wild Things
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An inventive and fantastical reimagining of Anne of Green Gables—with magic and witches!—that explores found family, loss, and the power of a girl's imagination, from the acclaimed author of The Language of Ghosts and The School Between Winter and Fairyland. Perfect for readers who loved The Girl Who Drank the Moon and Serafina and the Black Cloak.
"A magical, witchy, and thoroughly successful homage to a classic." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Grace has never been good at anything except magic—not that anyone believes her.
While other children are adopted from the orphanage, nobody wants Grace. So she decides to make a home for herself by running away and offering herself as an apprentice to the witch in the nearby woods. After all, who better to teach Grace to use her magic? Surely the witch can’t be that bad.
But the witch is that bad—she steals souls for spells and gobbles up hearts. So Grace offers a deal: If she can learn all 100½ spells in the witch’s grimoire, the witch will make Grace her apprentice. But if Grace fails, the witch can take her magic. The witch agrees, and soon an unexpected bond develops between them.
But the spells are much harder than Grace expected, and when a monster from the witch’s past threatens the home Grace has built, she may have to sacrifice more than her magic to save it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Told in the spirit of Anne of Green Gables, this highly imaginative fantasy novel by Fawcett (The School Between Winter and Fairyland) follows 12-year-old Grace Greene's path toward becoming a learned witch. After discovering that she has magical powers, Grace feels isolated from her peers at the Prince Edward Island orphanage where she lives. When losing herself in reading poetry no longer seems sufficient as distraction from her loneliness, she and her crow familiar, Windweaver, run away to the home of local witch Miss Puddlestone. There, Grace is offered a deal: if she can cast the spells within Miss Puddlestone's first grimoire by the time the cherry trees bloom, she will take Grace on as an apprentice. As Grace embarks on her endeavor, she meets neighbor Sareena Khalil, 12, and Rum, a fairy boy whose skin shifts tones, both of whom agree to accompany Grace on her quest. Frequently event-foreshadowing works from Grace's favorite writers, including Emily Dickinson and E. Nesbit, begin each chapter. Fawcett utilizes Grace's over-the-top expressiveness to convey with cheerful candor themes of bullying, loneliness, and regret; character interactions embody many flavors of friendship, which together merge into an exuberant tale of belonging and hope. Most characters read as white; Sareena is Lebanese and French Canadian. Ages 8–12.
